Abstract Due to advances in technology, the amount of image and video data becomes one of significant aspects in digital preservation systems. The specifications of a traditional digital archive usually focus on text-based documents, and are insufficient for archiving images and videos. In this paper, we study a few digital preservation projects to learn the general issuesand strategies. According to specific properties of image and video, we conclude that the more proper strategy is migration technologies for digital archive. We refer to the MPEG-21 DIA specification, since migration involves transcoding processes in this study. In addition, the metadata is based on the OAIS specifications along with some extension fields derived from the DIA attributes. This approach not only allows the system to communicate with existing systems, but also precisely records the technical attributes for future use. Finally, we propose a prototype consists of a job management module designed to connect with a transcoding module and a metadata module, which integrates with independent developed transcoders and metadata database by us to provide fundamental functions in migration of image and video.